Posts Tagged ‘Bakhmut’

A Bakhmut Reversal?

Wednesday, May 10th, 2023

Over the last several months, Russia would grind out costly gains in the fighting around Bakhmut, only to see Ukraine reverse most or all of those gains a few days or weeks later. This pattern repeated for month after month, with Russia slowly grinding out costly net gains of territory in and around Bakhmut, without ever completely taking the city.

However, in the last 24 hours, Ukraine seems to have made significant gains around Bakhmut in the last 24 hours.

A Ukrainian military unit said on Wednesday it had routed a Russian infantry brigade from frontline territory near Bakhmut, claiming to confirm an account by the head of Russia’s Wagner private army that the Russian forces had fled.

Later in the day, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who heads Ukraine’s ground forces, said Russian units in some parts of Bakhmut had retreated by up to 2 km (1.2 miles) as the result of counterattacks. He did not give details.

Wagner units have led a months-long Russian assault on the eastern city, but Ukrainian forces say the offensive is stalling.

Snip.

Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has repeatedly accused Moscow’s regular armed forces of failing to adequately support his men, said on Tuesday the Russian brigade had abandoned its positions.

“Our army is fleeing. The 72nd Brigade pissed away three square km this morning, where I had lost around 500 men,” Prigozhin said.

This follows up on Friday’s news that Wagner Group troops around Bakhmut had run out of ammo.

Suchomimus has a video that includes a hefty doses of both Azov head (I think Mykyta Nadtochiy) discussing the advances and Prigozhin complaining about it.

Significant news? I think so. Sector collapses in a front that Russia has poured so much equipment and manpower into can’t be good news for their war aims.

Is this Ukraine’s much-vaunted Spring Counteroffensive? I rather doubt it, though a full-scale front collapse would likely draw a significant investment of Ukrainian forces here.

Rather, I think this is a fixing attack, one designed to force Russia to keep all currently assigned troops in this sector to avoid surrendering gains, making it impossible to relocate them to areas of the front where the main action will actually fall.

But that’s just a guess…

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Posted in Media Watch, unions, video | 19 Comments »

LinkSwarm for May 5, 2023

Friday, May 5th, 2023

A Soros-backed DA is stepping down, a Harvard prof lying about playing footsie with commies sentenced, and another Democratic fundraiser convicted of fraud. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Good news, everyone! Soros-backed St. Louis Democrat DA Kim Gardner has resigned.

    On Thursday, a progressive prosecutor who was notoriously funded by far-left billionaire George Soros announced her resignation, after months of bipartisan pressure to do so.

    Fox News reports that Kim Gardner, the Circuit Attorney for St. Louis, announced that her resignation will be effective June 1st. Gardner was one of the first prosecutors in the country to be bankrolled by Soros, who has since expanded his efforts to other major cities across the country. She was first elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020, largely due to Soros’ financial backing. Prior to her resignation announcement, she had declared her intention to run for a third term in 2024.

    After years of criticism for being soft on crime and siding with criminals over victims, Gardner faced a whole new wave of criticism from both parties over an incident in February: Teenage volleyball player Janae Edmonson, who was visiting St. Louis from Tennessee for a tournament, was hit by an out-of-control car while crossing the road; although Edmonson survived, she had to have both of her legs amputated.

    The driver of the car was Daniel Riley, a man who was out on bond while awaiting trial for an armed robbery case. It was later revealed that Riley had violated the terms of bond dozens of times, but was never arrested. When the blame turned to Gardner for failing to keep him off the streets, she falsely claimed that her office had attempted to have Riley jailed once again, only to be denied by a judge; there are no records of her office filing any such motion or otherwise seeking the revocation of Riley’s bond.

    Following the Edmonson incident, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R-Mo.) filed a petition quo warranto, the process by which the state attorney general can fire a prosecutor who has been determined to be neglectful of her duties. Bailey claimed that as many as 12,000 criminal cases have been dismissed due to Gardner’s failures, with another 9,000 having been thrown out right before they were set to go to trial, due to Garnder’s office refusing to provide evidence and speedy trials for defendants.

    After Gardner’s announcement, Bailey released a statement demanding that she vacate her office immediately, rather than wait for another month.

  • The Biden Banking Crisis continues to bubble along. First Horizon, PacWest, and Western Alliance are the new banks facing trouble. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Wagner Chief to Pull Mercenaries Out of Bakhmut over Ammunition Dispute with Russian Military.”

    Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said he will pull his mercenaries out of the meat grinder that is the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 10, one day after Russia’s Victory Day Celebrations, which Russian president Vladimir Putin is expected to use to shore up support for the Russian invasion.

    The Wagner Group, a well-known mercenary unit known to be one of Russia’s most competent fighting divisions, is leading the charge on Bakhmut, a city that that has gained outsized symbolic importance.

    “I am withdrawing the Wagner PMC units from Bakhmut, because in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” Prigozhin said in full military fatigues and carrying an automatic weapon. The video he released showed him surrounded by masked Wagner fighters. Prigozhin also released a statement to the same effect.

    His forces had no choice but to withdraw to rear bases to “lick the wounds,” said Prigozhin, as translated by the Washington Post. If Wagner goes through with the withdrawal, it would be viewed as catastrophic in terms of morale. The Russian invasion has ground to a standstill after large-scale Russian and Ukrainian offensives last year. Kyiv, which has been amassing ammunitions including tanks and fighter jets, is expected to launch a fresh counterattack in the very near future.

    Prigozhin also launched a remarkable video tirade overnight on Telegram in which he displayed bodies of dozens of Wagner soldiers killed in Bakhmut. He angrily laid into the Russian Defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, for supplying Wagner with only 30 percent of the ammunition that’s needed.

    The statement released today claimed that number was even lower, standing at 10 percent.

    One caveat is that we’ve heard complaints from Prigozhin about his ammo supply before.

  • Russian soldiers dig trenches in horse graveyard in occupied Ukraine. Now they have anthrax.
  • “Biden CIA chief met with Epstein several times after financier convicted of child sex crime. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014, when the top spy official was deputy secretary of state and after Epstein was convicted of child sex exploitation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • “Harvard chemistry professor sentenced for lying about ties to CCP…Former Harvard University Chemistry Department Chair Charles M. Lieber was sentenced Wednesday to time served and over $80,000 in fines for committing fraud and for failing to disclose his connections to the Chinese Communist Party.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Longtime Democratic Campaign Strategist Charged with Election Fraud.” And completely different than the Democratic Party fundraiser convicted of fraud last week.

    New Jersey Democratic campaign strategist James Devine was charged with election fraud for allegedly submitting more than 1,900 fake petitions to help secure a 2021 Democratic gubernatorial primary ballot spot for candidate Lisa McCormick, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced Tuesday.

    Devine was McCormick’s campaign manager and sent the fake voter certifications to the New Jersey Secretary of State’s Division of Elections via email in April 2021, but the New Jersey Democratic State Committee challenged his attempt days later, arguing that all the forms featured same the style of signature and at least one of the named voters was deceased, Platkin said.

    A judge subsequently took McCormick off the primary ballot, and Devine is now charged with third-degree offenses concerning nomination certificates or petitions, tampering with public records or information and fourth-degree falsifying or tampering with records.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Kansas Becomes 1st State to Pass Law Defining Gender as a Person’s Sex at Birth.” One down, forty-nine to go…
  • Killer in Satan’s service finds the left’s child sexual mutilation fetish disgusting.
  • Shots of Minneapolis before and after the Antifa/BLM riots of 2020.
  • “El Paso Engulfed In ‘Mass Migration Dumpster Fire‘ As State Of Emergency Declared.”
  • Accused serial black widow killer charged with murdering her fifth husband.
  • “You just killed two people tonight.” “Yeah, but when can I go back to school?”
  • California banning diesel effective 2036.
  • Could sexbots and AI end humanity?
  • “Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs.” Funny how you never hear the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd going after the Sundar Pichais of the world.
  • Speaking of Google, I’m hardly an expert on AI, but here’s a piece that claims Google is getting its clocked cleaned by OpenSource AI.

    LoRA updates are very cheap to produce (~$100) for the most popular model sizes. This means that almost anyone with an idea can generate one and distribute it. Training times under a day are the norm. At that pace, it doesn’t take long before the cumulative effect of all of these fine-tunings overcomes starting off at a size disadvantage. Indeed, in terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT. Focusing on maintaining some of the largest models on the planet actually puts us at a disadvantage.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The Case of the Disappearing Swiss Cheese Holes.
  • Wes Anderson’s Star Wars.
  • A nice stroke of book collecting luck: I picked up an inscribed presentation copy of H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods. Or rather, I picked it up as part of a multibook lot back in February and didn’t realize it was inscribed until last week.
  • “Biden Deploys 1,500 Troops At Border To Help Register New Voters.”
  • “Pro Disc Golfer Disqualified After Testing Negative For Cannabis.”

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Supreme Court, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Russia’s Withdrawal From START: Less Than Meets The Eye

    Thursday, February 23rd, 2023

    It’s tempting to write up a piece on the one year anniversary of Russia launching its illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine, but the situation right now is largely a static cycle of “Russia grinds out gains near Bakhmut and Vuhledar, followed some time later by Ukraine mostly erasing those gains and inflicting heavy losses on Russian troops.

    So let’s talk about Putin’s announcement that Russia is suspending the New START treaty.

    Feb 21 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia was suspending participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, after accusing the West of being directly involved in attempts to strike its strategic air bases.

    “I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the strategic offensive arms treaty,” he said.

    New START is the successor to START I, signed by Bush41 and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, limiting strategic weapons to 6,000 nuclear warheads and 1,600 ICBMs and nuclear bombers. New START, signed by Obama and Putin, lowered that to 1,550 nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers (800 total for non-deployed). It placed no limits on tactical nuclear weapons.

    Should we worry that Putin is about to launch a new nuclear arms race?

    I wouldn’t.

    One repeated lesson of the Russo-Ukrainian War is that Russian equipment is ill-kept and ill-maintained. If Russia can’t even properly maintain it’s current military infrastructure, how is it going to launch a new nuclear arms race?

    The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. The U.S. spends more money maintaining nuclear weapons in a given year than Russia spends annually on its entire military. Thermonuclear weapons (not fission-only tactical nuclear weapons) require regular Tritium refresh. Fission weapons still require battery and explosive refresh. Where is Russia going to find money to expand it’s nuclear arsenal when it’s going into it’s second year fighting a full-fledged conventional war, for which it’s already expended most of it’s high precision munitions?

    Could Russia build more nuclear weapons? Sure. They have a lot of the old Soviet infrastructure left over, known Uranium deposits, and probably some remaining personnel from the Soviet era with the know-how to do so. But what they don’t have is an overabundance of money, with the Russian economy contracting under sanctions, dwindling hard currency reserves and difficulty obtaining high tech components.

    The real reason that Putin withdrew from START is that it allows America to carry out regular inspections of Russian infrastructure, and I’m sure they feared America relaying any actionable intelligence from such inspections to Ukraine.

    Aside from that, it’s likely this is simple brinkmanship designed to make the world back down from supporting Ukraine, but if Russia does want to expand it’s nuclear arsenal, expect the process to be slow, difficult and underfunded.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 9 Comments »

    Has Russia Blown Its Wad In Bakhmut?

    Monday, December 26th, 2022

    Since August, Russian forces (including a large contingent of Wagner Group mercenaries) has been assaulting the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the Dunba with almost monomaniacal focus, despite very little to show for their efforts. Despite small successes for Russia (a few streets here, an industrial area there, even capturing a garbage dump on the edge of town was listed as a major Russian achievement a few weeks ago) almost all of Bakhmut has remained stubbornly in Ukrainian hands.

    However, over the last day or two, tentative reports having come in that not only have Russian attacks slacked off, but that Ukrainian forces have recaptured not only just about all the hard-won territory Russia had gained in the city itself, but that some outlying areas were liberated after months of control. At the same time, there are numerous, persistent reports that Russia is running low on artillery shells in the region. (To be fair, repeated predictions that Russia must be running low on dumb ammunition of various types have failed to pan out heretofore.)

    Here Suchomimus reports that Russia has been pushed out of the industrial areas of Bakhmut in the east, and that Ukraine has recaptured most of the town of Opytne to the immediate southeast.

    This follows the Institute for the Study of War analysis from a couple of days ago that the Russian pace of attack has slowed.

    Russian forces’ rate of advance in the Bakhmut area has likely slowed in recent days, although it is too early to assess whether the Russian offensive to capture Bakhmut has culminated. Russian milbloggers acknowledged that Ukrainian forces in the Bakhmut area have managed to slightly slow down the pace of the Russian advance around Bakhmut and its surrounding settlements, with one claiming that Ukrainian forces pushed back elements of the Wagner Group to positions they held days ago. Ukrainian social media sources previously claimed that Ukrainian forces completely pushed Russian forces out of the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut around December 21. ISW has also assessed that Russian forces made slightly fewer overall advances in the Bakhmut area in November and December combined as compared to the month of October.

    Russian forces will likely struggle to maintain the pace of their offensive operations in the Bakhmut area and may seek to initiate a tactical or operational pause. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on December 24 that Russian forces currently lack the necessary stockpile of artillery munitions to support large-scale offensive operations and that sustaining defensive operations along the lengthy frontline in Ukraine requires the Russian military to expend a significant number of shells and rockets daily. The Ukrainian Joint Forces Task Force released an interview on December 24 with a Ukrainian servicemember in the Bakhmut area detailing that Russian forces have been conducting an extremely high pace of assaults on Ukrainian positions in the area with little corresponding progress. The Wagner Group’s reported heavy losses in the Bakhmut area in recent weeks have also likely strained Russian forces’ current operational capabilities in the area.

    The Russian military’s personnel and munitions constraints will likely prevent it from maintaining the current high pace of offensive operations in the Bakhmut area in the near-term. Russian forces previously allocated significant resources in a meat-grinder effort to seize Severodonesk and Lysychansk in spring–summer 2022. Russian forces culminated after capturing Lysychansk in early July and failed to capture neighboring Siversk to the east or Slovyansk to the northeast. The Russian military’s fixation with conducting a highly attritional campaign to achieve the tactical objectives of capturing Severdonetsk and Lysychansk ultimately undermined the Russian military’s ability to achieve its larger operational objective to envelop Ukrainian forces in a cauldron along the E40 highway and eventually drive to Donetsk Oblast’s western administrative borders. Russia’s relentless and costly push on Bakhmut may also degrade Russia’s ability to pursue long-term objectives in the Donbas theater.

    Another sign Russia may be running out of shells in Bakhmut: A tweet from Wagner Group saying just that, while also calling the Chief of Russian General Staff a “faggot.”

    “We have no shells! The boys are dying for us!”

    As usual with Ukraine news, all this is very tentative, and could be reversed to tomorrow. But right now it looks like Ukraine has the upper hand in Bakhmut.

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    Posted in Guns, video | 7 Comments »